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Kevin Bacon

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Posts posted by Kevin Bacon

  1. 3 minutes ago, mulder42 said:

    4/19/16 episode

     

      Reveal hidden contents

     

     

    Are you a bot? 

  2. I haven't followed the show for three seasons now, but my dad likes to tell me what's going on and I have to say, that sounds like the stupidest bullshit "cliffhanger" ending I've been aware of since the end of Rescue Me's third season. I'm not sure it's quite that bad, but it's not far off. It failed to the one, easy, easy thing that cliffhangers have to do to not be cheap, which is make the audience wonder what happens next, not wonder what already happened.

  3. One of the best episodes of the series yet last night. They're really ratcheting up the tension with the Jennings and Stan, and

    they paid off Nina's story in a way I hadn't expected and was as good as anything I imagined. Far and away the biggest death the show has had to date, and it was handled so coldly and bluntly that I wasn't sure this wasn't another dream sequence. But it wasn't. Nina is dead. The ruthless, abrupt, no bullshit finality with which her death was handled stands in stark contrast with The Walking Dead's bullshit publicity stunt death earlier this week. It shows the difference between a show with bark and a show with teeth.

  4. The impression I get about this is that it's a middle-of-the-road action flick with enough good aspects to be worthwhile if you're in the mood for a middle-of-the-road action flick. I'm excited to see Aaron Paul in something that isn't awful and I could stand to watch a middle-of-the-road action flick, so I'll probably catch a matinee. Living in a new city without any friends affords me a lot of free time so I'll probably be seeing more movies.

    • Like 1
  5. I liked the villain more than most it seems. Wasn't memorable and was one note, but he was charismatic and got the job done, and more importantly, wasn't overstretched. The film never tried to sell him as anything more than an evil fuck that Deadpool wants to kill, and he filled that role well. The movie relied on Deadpool himself, his character arc, and his relationship with Vanessa to such a degree that there wasn't a hole that could've been filled by a more interesting villain. I'd call that the key issue with the MCU's non-Loki villains--in addition to being derivative, they're far more central to their films' conflicts that their weaknesses are of much more detriment to the movie. Deadpool (and Guardians, albeit to a lesser extent) avoid that because the central conflict to the plot is an internal one among protagonist(s), where in The First Avenger or The Dark World, the conflict is the protagonist(s) vs the antagonist, so when the villain is one-note or forgettable, he's failing to hold up his end of the bargain where Ajax isn't. Deadpool's goal isn't to destroy Ajax to prevent him from ending the world, it's a hybrid of a simple revenge story and his desire to have his skin cured so he can have his life back (which, as Ajax said, was pure self-delusion on DP's part).

     

    The thing is, Deadpool's a radically different character than any Marvel's adapted to film before, so certain elements are going to have to be completely different to follow suit, and it makes comparing said elements an empty gesture. Deadpool, post-experiment, is a tragic character--insecure, self-loathing, nihilistic, selfish, cursed with immortality in a life he doesn't want. His love for Vanessa is the only thing he has to live for, and he's too afraid that she won't want him to embrace it. The role of a villain in this story is to exploit that conflict and progress it to create the drama, not to be the conflict himself. The movie successfully hits all these beats--the love story is engaging, Wilson's transformation into Deadpool is unsettling, Deadpool's position is sympathetic, and Francis is a solid, believable bad guy. He certainly isn't going to stand out at all in a crowd of superhero villains, but by the titular character's very nature, Deadpool has never been marketed on strong, cool villains like every other major superhero property. I don't imagine Deadpool 2 or any afterward are going to be any different. Where the key hurdle in most superhero franchises is finding a strong villain/scenario for the hero to overcome, for Deadpool it's going to be keeping Deadpool busy with engaging conflicts independent of whoever the villain ends up being. The introduction/growth of major secondary characters like Cable, X-Men crossovers, and Vanessa eventually becoming Copycat are a good start to that.

    • Like 3
  6. Jesus, pretty sure it's in no way unfair or difficult to understand why The Avengers would be considered a sequel and Deadpool or Guardians wouldn't be, unless you have some strange inclination to bend semantics in the favor of The Avengers. One movie had its entire leading cast starring in their own movies, all of which came directly before The Avengers in the films' timeline. Additionally, the entire supporting cast and the villain had all been featured in at least one of those five movies. The film's entire appeal was that it was a sequel to four different blockbuster movies at once. 

     

    The other movie being discussed features one minor character (who's been rebooted with a new actor and appearance) whose most prominent and recent appearance was a bit role in a movie that's ten years old. The only other argument to possibly be made is that the character Wade Wilson appeared in Wolverine, but again, it was an unrecognizably different version of the character, with a different, now non-canon backstory, and never appeared once as the Deadpool character. 

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  7. I think a big factor in the overperformance is an underestimation of the character's popularity to begin with. I don't read superhero comic books at all and I've been waiting for a Deadpool movie for years. Between a strong presence in video games and lots of merch in places like Hot Topic, the movie was always going to outperform something virtually unknown to non-comic book readers like Kick-Ass.

     

    That doesn't explain it outgrossing the likes of Thor, Captain America, Spider-Man, and X-Men, but still. I'd argue that the Deadpool brand was already as popular as something like Iron Man or GOTG was in the mainstream before those movies broke out and made the characters superstars.

  8. 7 minutes ago, WrathOfHan said:

    I haven't seen this season of Fargo so I'm just guessing :lol: 

     

    It's almost given, maybe we can hope for another Writing nomination.

     

    If FX runs the right campaign I could see her getting in.

    1. Ah, yeah, okay. That makes sense. On paper Danson does seem likely, which may be all he needs to get in.

     

    2. I'm keeping hope alive. People were vocal about season two's snub, but last year had actual established websites posting about it and it got a pretty strong reaction. Given that each season has been better than the one before it, that last season was arguably the best show of the year, and the way the plot is headed going into season four, I think it's possible. Of course, it's also heavily dependent on....

     

    3. This, which isn't gonna happen. Bless John Landgraf for the quality of the shows on his network, but they've always done a piss poor job getting them the awards attention they deserved. Be it more recently with the smattering of snubs for The Americans and its cast while shows like House of Cards keep getting attention, or all the way back at the beginning when The Shield got like three nominations total over the course of its seven seasons, two of them being in the first (and worst) season, and the other being for movie star Glenn Close, while the Goggins had to wait years until his also-great-but-not-as-great performance on Justified to get any attention. It's awesome that FX gives these shows more seasons based on their critical acclaim and quality despite their low ratings, but with that in mind you'd think they'd pimp the shows out where it counts. It's great that they can show blurbs in their ads about how Fargo, The Americans, and Louie are the best shows of the year, wouldn't they like to be able to throw "Emmy award-winner" in there?

     

    But yeah, I don't imagine enough Emmy voters will have even heard of You're the Worst for Cash get nominated, let alone win. Part of that's on the system being whack as hell, part of it's on FX for not acting accordingly.

    • Like 1
  9. 22 minutes ago, WrathOfHan said:

    Since we don't have a thread for this year and we're 5 months away, figured I'd start one now that we know a bit more about what way they could go. My current predicts:

     

     

    Hidden Content

     

    Ted Danson over Woodbine, Offerman, and Donovan? I suppose name value will help but honestly if Danson and Plemons both get nominated they'll have picked the two least awesome performances from the ensemble (and I say that in the nicest way possible).

  10. I'm a bit more lenient on this one because of the show's tragically low viewership, but ditto that for Aya Cash in Best Actress in a Comedy for You're the Worst. Should be a frontrunner but I'll be happy if she gets in at all. Chris Geere deserves attention to but even the Critic's Choice awards which were actually pretty good didn't nominate him so that's less likely.

  11. 2 hours ago, Spidey Freak said:

     

    She said if they had to make it R-rated, she would prefer it if it came in two cuts: R-rated and PG-13, because that would strengthen its BO chances. The comics aren't R-rated, just the video games, so it isn't like PG-13 would kill the character. The green band trailer had the same impact as the red band trailer. Making it R-rated is just unnecessary fanboy pandering, because Fox knows they screwed up with Origins. But it's not like fanboys wouldn't turn up for a PG-13 film. Now you have a situation where the character's appeal is reduced and families and children are barred from contributing to the movie's gross.

    Gotta disagree here. Both of Deadpool's red band trailers have been much better than the green band ones (though the new green band trailer is much better than the initial one). Sure, Deadpool doesn't need f-bombs to work, but it helps to get the spirit across in the context of a modern movie and the violence, even in the comic books, isn't very PG-13.

     

    Maybe they could've made a movie just as good as the one we're (hopefully) getting, but either they didn't write a good line in the movie that wasn't profanity-riddled or if they did, they didn't share them with the people cutting the trailers. Because as somebody who is very excited to see the movie, if I hadn't seen the red-band trailer I'd think it looked awful. 

  12. After seeing Goggins give an all-time great performance over the course of several years that went largely unnoticed as Shane Vendrell on The Shield (and of course his stellar work on Justified), it's such a wonderful thing to see him killing it in a major role in a major motion picture. Really, even if the movie wasn't as good as it was, the mere pleasant surprise of his character being one of the last ones standing would've made me a fan. Very grateful to Tarantino for giving him that spotlight.

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